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LayShad s04ep02
= Episode Summary = The introduction starts with the runners attempting to receive pay from a "Mister Tanaka... erm, I mean, Mister Johnson. Yes, Mister Tanaka Johnson" at Tsuki's Happy Kurakin (Kraken). They are interrupted by a bunch of "Yakuza" henchmen and a technomancer, who attempt to shoot up the place. Mr. Tanaka attempts to stiff them out of their pay and escape, but Yuna hides the cash under a plant. The thugs are taken down pretty easily by the group, and a man in the coffee shop named Ichiro Watanabe approaches them with a job offer on the spot. They return two days later and find most of the damage from the skirmish was repaired. Ichiro is a lawyer who works for the Mita-gumi, and says that he wants the runners to assist him in placing a Yakuza plant within a violent street gang in Yokohama known as the Boryokudan. To do this, the runners need to eliminate the wakagashira of the Boryukudan, a violent sociopath named Akira Tachibana. The runners contact his "plant" via Chinese delivery drone middleman, and find out the location of Akira's apartment and the Sutomukurou, a Japanese Goth Dance Club where Akira hangs out. When scoping out the Sutomukurou, they discover that Akira is deeply superstitious. Playing up on this, the Miko walks up to him (in a slightly Goth Miko outfit) and claims he is cursed by the spirits and will be visited by 3 ghosts of Christmas Past... or something to that effect. She summons a low Force Fire Elemental, who roasts all of Akira's Shinto accouterments (like spirit warding papers, etc.), then leaves. The Technomancer plants a Machine Sprite with gremlins on his sports car. They beat Akira back to his apartment. Yuna leaps to the balcony and accesses the host for the Technomancer so that he can hack into it with a wired connection. In the apartment, they find some evidence that Akira is planning a takeover and footage of him butchering prostitutes. The team decides to attempt psychological warfare on Akira, and plants a variety of "traps". The walls of his bedroom are covered in UV paint that says "Repent!" and the bedroom lights are replaced with UV lighting. The host is programmed to turn on the trideo loudly at odd hours to wake him up. Itching powder is placed on his bed. The Renraku Manservant-3 is programmed to attempt to kill him with a kitchen knife (while saying "Repent" repeatedly). At a key point, pretending to be the disturbed ghost of a slain prostitute, the Miko astrally projects and manifests, rising out of the ground with clawing hands and saying in a soft whisper monotone "Repent". Akira screams and attempts to shoot the Miko with his large stash of guns, but all of them were bricked by the Technomancer prior. Akira leaves and instructs his cronies to kidnap Ryo and interrogate him, as part of the takeover plan. The team manages to track down Ryo's location (after realizing that the only contact info they have is the Chinese delivery service) and get him out of there before he is tortured. Akira stays at a No-Tell Motel, and the runners step up their game. They program the host to give Akira a fake ad for Doc's medical services. Yuna sneaks in and injects Akira with hallucinogens, further pushing his sanity to the limit. The Miko appears again astrally, and Akira freaks out and calls up Doc's clinic to "help solve his spirit problem." When Akira arrives at Doc's clinic, they strap him down to the table, then pretend the Evo Orderly robot goes haywire and "kills" the Doctor. The robot goes after Akira next, who claws at his restraints until he gets free. A third appearance by the Miko finally drives him over the edge, and he checks himself into a mental institution. At the mental institution, Doctor Makka Ninja walks in and gets admitting privileges to the Clinic, and orders a long-term sedative regimen for Akira, effectively putting the target away for a long time. "I saw him die! He's dead! I swear, he's dead!" was the last thing the Doc heard as he walked away from the clinic. = Reward = * Intro run - 2 Karma, 3000 nuyen * Karma breakdown - 2 Karma Survival, 1 Karma for successfully planting the mole, 1 Karma for doing it with no collateral damage, 2 Karma Challenge, 1 Karma bonus for method. * Pay breakdown - +3 for Dice Pool, +1 for Two vs One, Professional Rating 4 opponents, +1 for Speed and Subtlety, bonus 15% for negotiations. * Total - 9 Karma, 23700 nuyen = People Met = * Mr. Tanaka Johnson - The terrible Mr. Tanaka that met the runners in the intro, he watched too many reruns of the Shadowrun group from the previous LA campaign and thought he could leap out a window like CNR (which actually happened). What actually happened was a bleeding, groaning Mr. Tanaka lying on the ground just outside the window of Tsuki's Happy Kurakin. * Asuka Bando - The bartender at Tsuki's. * Ichiro Watanabe - A Mita-gumi pencil-pusher, he holds great sway with the Mita-gumi. His favorite coffee shop is Tsuki's (for whatever reason), and he gives the runners a job. He is a slender tall Japanese man (6' tall) with dark skin and angular eyes, with an old Armante business suit. * Ryo Matsumoto - An elf with dyed blonde hair, who is Ichiro's informant in the Boryokudan gang. * Akira Tachibana - A violent psychopathic man who is driven to insanity by the team. Formerly the 2nd in command (wakagashira) of the Boryokudan. = Places Visited = * Tsuki's Happy Kurakin - A coffee shop that specializes in squid appetizers located in Yokohama. * Sutomukurou - "Storm Crow", a Japanese Goth Bar/Dance Club, located in Yokohama. * Whole Mind Mental Health Clinic - Where Akira ended up at the end. = Quotes = * "Gothstitutes. You know, Goth Prostitutes." - Steve * "And it appears that he filmed the killings of the the prostitutes." -GM "Ew" -Erica "The things I've seen..." - Steve, as Renraku Manservant-3 * "What's the ceiling like?" - Erica, like 10 times during the run. * "Hey, listen in to Shinto confession radio! Someone's dishonored their ancestors, tell us how! Call 1-800-..." - Steve, as a late-night Shinto proselytizing trid program. * "I need an order of GTFO. Erm, immediately?" - Steve, on how to deliver a message to the Chinese food delivery place that was the dead drop for the group's contact. * "Will it be painful?" - Akira "Oh, no, not at all. Oh wait. You mean for you? Yes, very painful." - Doc = GM Postmortem = This was a "fun" (if driving a sociopath completely insane then institutionalizing him against his will can be called fun) and creative session on the part of the players. I absolutely loved all of the many ways that you guys came up with to scare the bejeezus out of him, and had to come up with a special Composure mechanic to keep track of his insanity. I really enjoyed GMing this one. The premise of the run was pretty simple. I wanted to give the team a job in which they have to perform a "wetwork" without actually killing the target in question. Eliminating someone with a bullet is pretty simple. Eliminating someone without actually ending their life can be quite difficult. I built the run in an open-ended manner, setting up a time table (when the mole will be exposed, when the target will attempt to stage his coup, etc.) and letting you guys decide the pace of what you were going to do. It takes a fair amount of setup time for this (and some wasted effort on my part, because there were parts of the run you folks didn't see), but the plot of the run was pretty simple at its core and anything extra was just added icing. I had several options available to take down the target (including some political methods and a couple of law enforcement options), but when you guys went the supernatural angle, I thought it would be fun to run with it. I had "superstitious" as a character trait for the target so that he would pay deference to the Miko, and thus the team would have at least one chance at social interactions with him on neutral terms, but that character hook seemed to pay a lot of dividends for the plot of this run. I'm also pleased at the format of "mini-run" first to get in some combat at the beginning of the game. This gave me far less pressure to include a combat later in the session just so the combat-oriented characters can feel useful rather than dead weight. There was a potential combat when the gangers were about to kidnap the mole, but I gave you guys a fair chance to keep him from getting kidnapped, since you had the foresight to listen in on his conversations. The idea for the Goth Japanese nightclub came from the word "Storm Crow", which was generated from a list of random bar names. I thought "this sounds really Gothy... oh wait. Japanagoths?" and it stuck. Bonus points for the translation on Babelfish ending up with Sutomukuro.